"Howdy Folks! Welcome to the little mining town of Rainbow Ridge, the gateway to Nature's Wonderland"

This is my documentation of my miniature re-creation of the long-gone Disneyland attraction: Mine Train Thru Nature's Wonderland. This is a selectively compressed model railroad, in On30 scale at 5' X 7.5' that has been in progress since 2005; even after almost 10 years of work, it's still not finished.

I started the layout when I was a sophomore in high school with basic skills and over the years the layout has been improved and reworked in drastic ways to match my ever improving model making skills. In fact, since I started rebuilding the sections to better quality and standards, I've actually created a whole new layout, piece by piece.

This is a stand-by basis project without a deadline, so it tends to hit the back-burner a lot due to other things with higher priorities. But whenever I can, I'll give an update when there is something worth talking about. All of my updates since day one are here, which include photos, videos, and plenty of rambling notes and descriptions.

More night time lighting has been installed, desert lighting is pretty much done, though I'm probably going to add some bright 12 volts here and there to kind of brighten up the scene a little more, "exaggerate" the lighting a bit (I'm sure NWRR wasn't lit up this much, but it's kind of my own little touch)

The white bulbs are still awaiting colored gels at the moment. Also, I rigged the lights on a timer so they'll click on at sundown and shut off when I hit the sack, and then they turn on again in the morning for an hour or two as if the lights were on all night.

In other news, I gave my locomotive some "Bullfrog Snot" to improve traction. I'll do a full review of it later in another thread

This is the current area that's being worked on, the back of the desert:
(this is a supersize image, so click on it to see more detail!)

The little section on the right where the two LED's are is where the Dinosaur bones are going. I'll probably have to sculpt it, since I couldn't find any kits that were the right size or quality (or even the right dino!)

Beaver Valley and Bear Country were ripped up today, or rather the beat-up, torn, and yellowed newpaper forms that were there were ripped out. This area has been considered the "trash dump" because whenever an area was redone, all the debris was dumped into there to clear the space. Once Rainbow Ridge is complete (once the desert is complete!) progress will move into this area. It'll be interesting to figure out, considering Rainbow Ridge, Beaver Valley, Bear Country, Cascade Peak, and Natural Arch Bridge are all in very close proximity with each other unlike the real thing. I have to kind of separate the areas to a certain extant. I'll have to get creative with trees...